There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

Regardless of if you are using low cost or free advertising (like Traffic Exchanges) or an expensive CPA campaign, the way to squeezing the most results from your advertising dollars is by following up with your potential consumers.

We’re living in a time now that gives is more opportunities to connect with our customers (or potential customers) than ever before, but email remains one of the most trusted form of online communication. The benefits to building your email subscribption list are obvious to those who participate, but if you’re thinking of whether or not building a list is right for you, it can seem like a confusing and daunting task.

Advertising Multiple Products

If you are advertising multiple complimentary products than building a list is a necessity. When you advertise your product on traffic exchanges, viral mailers, or CPA advertising like Google Adwords, you are paying per click (or page view) so when your consumer views your ad, you have an opportunity there to generate a sale. However when they close the page or skip over your ad, that opportunity is now lost. Instead, if you focus on capturing them on an email list or newsletter, you are given an opportunity to generate repeat advertising. Why waste your one opportunity when you can leverage it and turn it into multiple sales opportunities? Obviously two is greater than one, so instead of just presenting your dry sales page, create an opportunity for them to join your email list this so you can continue to advertise products to them.

Repeat Visitors

If you are into blogging or have your own sales website, building an email list is the cornerstone of an effective marketing campaign. Being able to remind members, or potential members, of your product or service are essential to bringing them back. In some cases your potential customer may have been greatly interested in your product, but be browsing on their cell phone or have to run to make it to an appointment and don’t have the time right now to complete the registration process. By using an email list you can remind your customers of your product and service and drive repeat visitors to your sales opportunity, or bring them back to your next blog post.

Follow Up

Any experienced sales person will tell you that follow up is crucial to generating sales. Studies have shown that only 2% of sales are generated on the first contact, simply being able to follow up with your customer will generate a massive increase in opportunity for sales. By allowing your potential customer to share their email address with you, you have an opportunity to contact them a second, third, fourth (etc) time and follow up with your potential customers to generate sales.

Build Trust

In the last point we mentioned that only 2% of sales are generated on the first contact, this means that 98% of all customers will not purchase until a certain level of trust has been developed. Being able to have them subscribe to your email list or newsletter creates an opportunity for you to provide value and build trust, to create a line of communication with your potential customer. You can leverage this contact opportunity to build trust and confidence with your product which will help drive sales with new leads.

The internet is a very noisy place, and it can be extremely difficult to share your message in a noisy social world. As a marketing an advertising expert I see tons of opportunities lost every day in advertising by people not creating an opportunity to follow up and build trust with their potential consumers. A simple list building strategy can be used to maximize sales right now and start turning leads into customers, and new visits into repeat traffic.

Advertising in traffic exchanges can sometimes be a tricky business, it’s easy to get frustrated and feel like you just want to walk away, but using a few basic advertising techniques you can easily massively increase your advertising results from Traffic Exchanges.

One of the keys to creating success for your advertising campaigns is TARGETING.

One of the coolest things about Traffic Exchanges is the extremely low cost of advertising, for example at Traffic Swirl you can get advertising for on average around $0.60 for 1,000 views. Those of you who are used to CPA advertising methods are used to paying that much (and often more) for just 1 visit, so getting it not only under 1 cent per click, but under $0.001 per click, probably sounds like heaven. What’s the catch? There is none. It’s that inexpensive (or you can surf and earn free credits) and each view is a real human view, verified by captcha.

Although most there are exceptions (like Traffic Swirl), most traffic exchanges do not really offer much in the way of targeting, but you can do a few simple tricks to still turn this traffic into conversion machines. I’ve gotten conversion rates as high as 1% from traffic exchanges, when used effectively. At 1%, that is an acquisition cost of 6 cents. Even if you were at 0.1% your acquisition cost still puts other advertising methods to shame. You may wonder how you can get your conversions that high.. well.. it’s easy.. and it’s called targeting.

Identify Your Audience

Those of you who use traditional CPA advertising will already know these methods, but they are very often neglected in Traffic Exchanges. Identifying your Audience is one of the single most valuable things you can do to increase your advertising results. For example, most of the audience at Traffic Swirl consists of aspiring entrepreneurs, so being able to advertise a product or service that appeals to small business owners can become an easy sell when you frame your message correctly. Marketing services, hosting services, email marketing solutions, and training systems are very valuable to these members.

Frame Your Message

When you are aware of your target audience (and the audience you are advertising to) the next step to success is reaching the point of convergence where those two things meet. For example, if I were trying to sell a product based on email marketing (autoresponder), I would focus my ad on how the necessity of generating repeat traffic, and the emphasis of following up with your customers (or potential customers). The key is to identify a potential problem your viewer may have, then to effectively translate how your product will solve their problem. For example, I might want to share with them how many opportunities are lost by not following up with members, and how this product will help solve that issue by allowing them to follow up with their members and increase residual traffic and sales.

Landing Pages Matter

One of the keys to success with expensive CPA advertising is tailoring landing pages specifically for your ad, and that is no different in Traffic Exchanges. If you are trying to sell a vacuum cleaners, and you tailored your ad as a solution to vacuuming out your shop after building your latest woodworking project, you wouldn’t want to send them to a sales page that highlights vacuums designed for cleaning carpet or furniture. Instead you would want to make sure your sales page is relevant to your ad, often creating several different variations of the sales page for your different types of ads.

Targeting through Theming and Personalization

The easiest way you can increase your advertising results right now is to personalize and theme your advertising. The more personalized you can make it, the better. In an ideal world we’d be able to include the viewers name in our ad, but since that is not often possible, you can still personalize your advertising to the location you are advertising at. Using the same colors and imaging of the site you are advertising at will increase your results. Your ad will appear more as though it is part of the site. In the age of banner blindness, we quickly and easily tune out the sharp contrast of advertising against the style of the website. We can mitigate that by forming an ad that blends to the styles of the location we advertise at. This is a common technique to increasing conversions on banners (and splash pages) that is so effective that some advertising sources in fact require you to create an ad in the style of their website in order to maximize your results as well as create a less disruptive environment for your members (DISRUPTION KILLS LOYALTY)

Traffic Exchanges are an excellent way to advertise inexpensively, and using just a few easy tricks (and a little bit of time) you can easily increase your traffic exchange advertising results.